Sourcing policy

Where candidates come from

• Direct submissions — anyone can submit a car through Sell your car.
• eBay Motors — the official eBay Browse API, filtered to cars and our make/model allow-list. We never scrape eBay’s pages.
• auto.dev — a licensed listings API covering dealer inventory nationwide, filtered the same way.

We only use official, authorized APIs for automated sourcing. We do not scrape HTML from any marketplace, auction site or dealer, and we do not automate account logins to gather listings.

The qualification rule

A candidate is considered for the magazine if it meets any one of these, deterministically — no model judgment calls, no exceptions made by hand:

• The make and model are on our allow-list — enthusiast and classic marques (Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, Aston Martin and similar), specific American muscle (Corvette, GTO, Hellcat, Viper), Japanese icons (Supra, NSX, GT-R, RX-7), European classics, and more.
• It has real factory performance: roughly 400 horsepower or more, or a manufacturer-claimed 0-60 time of 4.5 seconds or quicker.
• It was built before 1975 — old enough to be interesting on its own, regardless of make.

We exclude, regardless of the above:

• Salvage or rebuilt titles, and parts cars.
• Non-running cars, unless they predate 1960.
• Anything that doesn’t clear one of the qualification rules — most ordinary commuter cars, in other words.

How we rank

Once a candidate qualifies, it gets a deterministic 0-100 editor score from: rarity (production numbers, where we know them), age, performance, positive signals in the description (matching numbers, one owner, documented history, low mileage, original paint), and a penalty for negative signals (rust, "needs work", project car, accident, flood). The score decides ranking; it never overrides the qualification rule above, and it never publishes anything by itself — every candidate is reviewed by a person before it goes live.

What we don’t do

No AI-written descriptions presented as if they were the seller’s own words. No fabricated listings, ever — if the magazine looks sparse, that’s because it is; we don’t fill space with things that aren’t real. No paid placement that isn’t disclosed.